The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#695 – Making The Invisible, Visible with Sam Aldhaher

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Welcome Sam Aldhaher, power engineer and 3D graphic artist!

  • Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering
  • He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years
  • Inputs and outputs
  • Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD
  • Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL
  • KiCad -> Blender is a good flow, as there are add-ons to import KiCad
  • Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials
  • Building library of models
  • Modeling magnetic fields
  • Research in wireless power
  • openEMS vtk format
  • The marjority of tooling is glued together with python
  • ElectroMag Nodes – Sam‘s tool – $1
  • Right hand rule
  • Developing intuition
  • Elmer finite element solver
  • Past guest Katerina Galitskaya also visualized RF and talked about the differences of testingi n a chamber vs building a visualization
  • FastHenry is inductance tool that was created in 80s at MIT for wirebonds. Didn’t have a visualization front end, like SPICE
  • 3D whiteboard
  • Using Blender to prototype and then taking it to other tools (CST, Ansys)
  • Validating on the bench with an impedance analyzer
  • Simulating power loss is difficult
  • Quality factor
  • “CAD is too perfect”
  • Adding surface imperfections
  • Node system is similar to simulink, adding blocks (Chris also thought this sounded like the effects in Davinci Resolve)
  • Lighting
  • Making the background dark means you don’t need to have far field details
  • Tutorials
  • Blender Guru – how to make a donut
  • Sam’s video about how to draw components on a PCB in Blender
  • Doing the same with Geometry nodes in Blender
  • Ability to create things procedurally
  • How to create ICs in Blender
  • Using LLMs for python glue code
  • What is a shader?
  • HardOps tool, simplifies workflow (shuffle button)
  • Visualizing an Inverted F antenna in Blender
  • Remembering that videos are just still frames in order
  • Electric fields propagating on the antenna itself
  • Radiated electric fields (red and blue and black)
  • OpenEMS generates GBs of data
  • Blender geomtry goes out to OpenEMS so it’s geometrically linked
  • What if it was a ceramic antenna instead of a metal inverted F?
  • Simulating 60 GHz from a radar chipset
  • Meshing – sample points in space
  • simulating points in time
  • Impacts of stubs / squares on microwaves
  • Human Hand Interaction with 60GHz Electromagnetic waves
  • SAR simulations – how much heat do you generate
  • Simulating motor windings on a PCB
  • The above was a collaboration with past guest Carl Bugeja
  • When to switch from near field (electro) vs far field (openEMS)
  • Calculating values with inductance calculator
  • FastHenry tool on Github
  • Sam’s work on artstation
  • ZS smart watch
    • Fast track if listeners want to get better at this art
      • Learn blender – donut
      • KiCad -> Blender reference
      • Play with geometries nodes (ElectroMag Nodes, Fast Henry)
      • Find Sam on social
        • LinkedIn
        • Twitter/X
        • YouTube
        • Instagram
        • EEVblog forum
          • ...more
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